The Direction of the Narnia Movies
by Anna3422
Summary: "Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This is a story about what happened to them, when director Andrew Adamson decided that they were no longer marketable to a modern audience." - My bizzare way of ranting.


Right. So I don't mean to offend anyone with this, least of all the filmmakers. It is, however, a rant. It was written before the 3rd movie, so it doesn't entirely make sense anymore. The idea came from a conversation I had with my sister a long time ago. It was pretty silly, so I figured someone online might enjoy it.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

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><p><em>A Scathing Commentary on the Direction of the Narnia Movies, with Added Randomness<em>

Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This is a story about what happened to them, when director Andrew Adamson decided that they were no longer marketable to a modern audience.

You see these children were good and courageous people who had had the great misfortune to become famous at a young age. Their deeds have been widely admired by historians, but it is a common tragedy in our world that, whenever anything particularly interesting is recorded, the information is sold to a company in Los Angeles. (This is doubly curious, because such companies were rare during these children's childhood.)

Now I don't mean to say that the company in question was all bad. It in fact funded many of the great artists of the age but, much like the churches of Medieval Europe, it struggled with internal corruption.

One of these artists was named Andrew Adamson, and by a complicated series of circumstances, it came to him to film the early adventures of the Pevensie children (as they were called). He was promptly told to recreate the wonderful land of Narnia on film, without having ever seen the place. A daunting task, but as compensation he was given large sums of money with which to create this film.

Being of a determined and industrious mind set, Adamson faired quite well. However, while he worked tirelessly on what would be his greatest creative project, he became more and more entangled in the complex doctrines of his employers. Adamson realized with growing dread that a story of four children, who fight against physical, emotional, and political adversity in their quest to do what is right, is not in keeping with modern values. The children, he realised, were far too good. Didn't the parenting books always say how nasty kids could be? And how the only way to possibly stand them was to buy more parenting books from the same publisher?

The company agreed that such a generation could never relate to the reasonable Peter, the maternal Susan, or the naive and innocent Lucy. Even if most of the characters were nice, there would always have to be one token jerk in the mix.

Luckily for the first film, there was still Edmund: A chronically unlucky child, even by modern standards. As king, he is said to have accomplished great things, including the saving of lives, the passing of humane laws, and the prevention of many wars. Even so, Edmund is still best known to the public for having bartered his siblings for candy when he was nine. Old reputations die hard, but there you have it. Adamson had concrete evidence that at least one of the children had gone through a bad phase and did not have to worry about finding another token just yet.

The real problem started with the second film. By now, Adamson and his cast had imbibed a cynicism that is common to filmmakers. The character of Edmund had been redeemed and so the company at once set to work creating an evil Peter and Caspian. These, he realized, were far less literary and far more Hollywood. Instead of having ideas and character traits, these scripted personalities were bursting with aggression and testosterone, making them far more marketable. (Of course, the characters had really marketed far better in the first film, but we mustn't destroy the filmmakers bubble about this.) Adamson and his cast pretended to be satisfied.

It was on the third film that the director hit an impasse. More than ever, the Pevensies' insufferable goodness came back to haunt him. The story of a voyage at sea was not only slow, it was subtle! The narrative displayed all manner of obsolete referrences to philosophy and the imagination. The characters were not motivated by materialism, but by curiosity! Something had to give.

And that is when Adamson cracked. Casting around for a plot device, he summoned his lowly team of scriptwriters (a pathetic and downtrodden specimen) and bade them give the story a villain. This was difficult. The male characters had notably all been used up for this purpose. However, after much toil and much suffering, the answer finally came to them.

There were two characters, suitably meek and compliant for the task, who had been positively portrayed thus far: Lucy the Valient and Queen Susan. Over the course of the films, these two had been slowly but surely creeping out of character. Lucy, however, was quite out of the question. Even in the midst of capitalist sabotage, the line had to be drawn somewhere. Besides which, audiences actually liked her, and it was better not to disrupt the patterns established in earlier films.

And so the script-writers were locked away in a dismal cell (one with whitewashed walls and a bad radio), and there they set to work on creating a new Susan. One who readers of the original biography had never seen the likes of before. This was a Susan who no longer fussed and fretted over the well-being of others, but who took charge over her own destiny. This Susan thirsted for power and thought of her siblings merely as disposable tools on her way to the throne.

The throne, you see, was her all consuming interest. And by throne, she did not mean some cheery, ideological joint rulership with three other people. No. What movie-Susan wanted was absolute dominion over Narnia.

Time passed at the pace it normally does on film, and within a few seconds of her creation, movie-Susan had done away with her historical counterpart and had seemlessly integrated herself into court life. (The beauty of this was that none of the courtiers noticed any change in her, due to the wonder of CGI.)

On her first morning at Cair Paravel, movie-Susan enlisted the help of the most honourable Ginabrik in her plans for world domination. They created a secret chamber, deep within the bowels of the castle, which no one but the strongest and the purest of blood could enter. There they sat all through the night, resembling the script-writers from earlier in this story, in their exhaustive attempts to sabotage the other rulers.

On one such night, blond-movieverse-Peter was careless enough to pry into the monetary records that detailed trade with the lone islands and was much confused to see that he owed money for a variety of illegal poisons. Ginabrik brought word of the outrage to movie-Susan and, that night, a map of blond-movieverse-Peter's skull was hung in the secret chamber, with the caption _'Disposable Tool #1' _written underneath.

Next came the unfortunate discovery of the secret chamber by teenage-movieverse-Edmund, who's picture was tacked up neatly beside his brother's. Lastly, came the unfortunate realization by movie-Susan that Narnia would never fall under her complete dictatorship if there were two queens. Movie-Susan was hesitant to do away with her siblings unless she felt sure that they suspected her plans, so she attempted to rid herself of movie-Lucy, by setting her up with one of the numerous foreign princes who visited the castle.

In spite of hours of work, however, movie-Susan failed in her efforts to barter away her younger sister to foreign nobility. Something about Lucy's being ten years old, it seemed, was off-putting. Movie-Susan simply didn't understand it.

And so it came to pass that three of the Pevensie children met their demise. For, one night, driven by greed and paranoia, Movie-Susan crept into their rooms, holding an elephant tusk (ivory being quite common in movie-Narnia, although there are no elephants in the region) and stabbed each of her siblings through the heart.

Now, you can imagine, this was a very dark business, and no sooner were the three Pevensies dead than movie-Susan was overcome by remorse, leading her to quickly fetch a set of old-school electric paddles which she heroically used to revive her siblings. From here, followed a long sequence were Movie-Susan spent a full minute learning CPR another saving each of her siblings, and two minutes giving a rousing speech about the wrongness of her actions. By the end of the film, she looked very heroic indeed and the kingdom of Movie-Narnia were so grateful it was deemed that Movie-Susan should be made Empress over her siblings.

And so they all lived happily . . . although there was always some controversy over why Peter had been revived last and why it took Movie-Susan so long to get to him after saving her other siblings. Adamson suffered a nervous breakdown during the editing process, changed his name, and became a tour guide. And Susan (the real one) was fished out of the River Rush by a passing traveller and nursed back to health in Ettinsmoor, where her siblings were in hiding. Ettinsmoor became a veritable refugee camp for Narnians that had been replaced by CGI automatons, it being deemed the safest place for them to live. But who knows for how long . . .


End file.
